When it comes to the iPhone, large entertainment companies are sitting on the sidelines. NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) can’t justify investing in one platform, but instead is putting equal time and investment across the board at this point, Salil Dalvi, NBCU’s GM of wireless, told mocoNews. He’s not yet convinced there’s a huge advantage of building on-device applications for the iPhone’s updated operating system. “We didn’t feel that we had to be there on day one … One of the real surprises from my perspective is it just really changes how we approach the market,” Dalvi said.  “We’re taking a look at it. We haven’t ruled it in or ruled it out at this point … Do we get 80 percent of what the benefit is just by offering a highly-optimized experience on a web site?” For games, there’s a clear benefit, but for large entertainment companies that consider video their bread and butter the economic model around iPhone applications is still unknown.

For the time being, NBCU’s more immediate focus is on building up its ad-supported efforts for the mobile web, regardless of which device or platform brings users there. Video consumption is growing for NBCU on all smartphone platforms, something that was recently still considered a niche target market for the company. “Smartphone usage in general is representing a larger share of our traffic than I expected,” Dalvi said. Despite the shorter reach and scale of the more capable devices, he said NBCU has also made tweaks to its mobile web sites to make use of certain features on devices than run operating systems from BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and the iPhone.